All over the world, food preparers cook and serve ready-to-eat pasta helpings of the Italian influence, such as spaghetti, ravioli and the like. It is known that the cooking of the above mentioned typical Italian dishes is currently carried out in a traditional manner by one or more specifically designed operators, according to a sequence of steps performed by hand and often in an extemporary manner. Consequently the result depends on the operator's skill and the quickness of the service. Various factors affect the result, including the number of helpings to make ready in a given unit of time, the number of operators, and the quality of the ingredients. The above conventional system for preparing and serving pasta helpings suffers from the following practical drawbacks. First, the quality of the final product can vary from time to time or from dish to dish, depending on variations in the operator's skill, the quickness of the service, the supplied ingredients, etc. Secondly, the economics of using certain staff can highly affect the profitability of a commercial enterprise. Lastly, the conventional system for preparing and serving pasta helpings lacks an ability to be able to quickly and effectively scale the system to meet greater demand for pasta.
Known machines for automated cooking of pasta typically comprise an initial cooking chamber in which the pasta placed therein is processed with water or hot pressurized steam, and a second chamber in which the pasta product is placed after completion of the first cooking stage. Most of these machines are complicated affairs, are very expensive to manufacture, and even more costly to maintain. With few exceptions, their performance is unpredictable and leaves a great deal to be desired. By and large, these known machines are too unreliable and impracticable for commercial use.
Further, conventional methods of pasta cooking involve the hydration and cooking of pasta via immersion in boiling water. Pressure cooking at the resulting increased temperatures creates a dramatic decrease in the required cooking time. But previous fast pasta cooking devices are relatively energy inefficient as they discharge the heat energy of the vapor released upon depressurization of the pressure cooking chamber. Also, the previous designs utilize hinged doors for releasing cooked pasta discharge from the cooking vessel. These hinged doors add manufacturing complexity/expense and increase the machines manual cleaning requirements.
As a result, there exists a need for improvements over the prior art and more particularly for a more efficient and expedient automated pasta cooking and dispensing device that consistently produces a quality product.